Last Hope
by ScandalousCastleAnatomy
Summary: All that Fitz wanted was his wife back. She was the love of his life, the mother his child, and the one person that held his world spinning on its axis. He just didn't know how long he could sit at her bedside, waiting for her, while staring into a perfect replica of her eyes on their only daughter. (TUMBLR PROMPT)
1. Chapter 1

Another prompt, this time from **screengeniuz**. It's another one of my favorites and I'm still working on the additional parts so input is appreciated.

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**Olivia is terribly injured and put in a coma after an attempt on her life.**

The hospital room was silent except for the incessant beeping of the machine monitoring her heart rate. The machine that was once a beacon of hope that Olivia would live another day and she was fighting for her life was now just a painful reminder that she _hadn't_ woken up. That she _wasn't_ fighting.

"Are we going to be here long?"

A voice sounds from behind Fitz. He'd almost forgotten that he wasn't alone. It was easy to make everything disappear when he was here with her. He shakes his head, staring ahead at Olivia's frail body. She was already extremely thin when she was full of life but now that she wasn't, it seemed that her body was wasting away before his eyes.

"No…not _too_ long." Fitz shakes his head, trying to find the woman that he fell in love with within the feeble body in front of him. "I just had a bad day and needed to see her."

"Do you think that Momma knows when we're here? Do you think it makes her feel better, too?"

Fitz smiles at that question as his daughter climbs into the hospital bed and tucks herself into Olivia's side, wrapping her arms around her body as if she were really holding her.

"I like to think so." He replies softly, watching as his little girl laid her head on her mother's chest to listen to her heart beat.

It made his heartache to know that these were the moments that she would remember with her mother instead of the one's that were filled with laughter and joy. All of her memories would be of sterile hospital rooms and silence.

"Can you tell her a story?" Her voice sounds from where her face is tucked into Olivia's chest. "I like it when you read me stories, Daddy. It makes me feel better."

He couldn't and wouldn't deny her. Not when she looked at him with eyes that were the perfect replica of her mother's. It was hard at first, looking at his daughter only to see his wife staring back at him but now it was like a blessing. Her looks were the greatest tie that she would ever have to her.

"I don't really know any stories to tell her. Not any fun ones anyway."

"What about when I first talked? Lotsa people like stories about babies. Do you remember, Daddy?"

He smiles at her and takes a seat next to the bed, his hands immediately finding Olivia's to caress it as he spoke.

"Of course I remember. Your mom freaked out for a week because she was convinced that you were ready to talk and she didn't want to miss it. She just kept saying it over and over."

_"'Say Momma'. Fitz, don't laugh. I know she's going to say something. It's on the tip of her tongue. You know when she opens her mouth and she moves her head? She's ready to talk and she just can't get it out."_

_"Or maybe, just maybe, she's being a baby. You know, little humans that don't yet have control over all of their muscle functions."_

_He can practically hear her roll her eyes at him through the phone._

_"Fine. Don't take this seriously but you're going to miss it. Right, Lol." Her voice morphs into baby gibberish as she redirects her attention. "Daddy's gonna be jealous when you say 'Momma' first because I'm your favorite parent. Right? Say 'Momma'. 'Momma'."_

_Fitz shakes his head at her, listening to the baby murmur through the phone. Olivia had been at it for a week, completely convinced that their daughter was going to start talking soon. _

_"Well, I'm going to go. I should be home in the next hour. Don't bore, Lola too much with your crazy talk."_

_She scoffs at him, taking the phone off of the speaker function._

_"You know, she gets this from you. Taking her time to do things when she wants to do them."_

_"I think the name of the trait that you're looking for is called stubbornness and that's definitely a Pope trait if I've ever heard one."_

_"Lies, fairytales, and fallacies, Fitzgerald Grant."_

_He laughs at her cheekiness._

_"Whatever you say, Livvie. I love you both."_

_It's almost like he can feel her smile through the phone and then she's gone urging him to make it home in exactly an hour._

_Olivia's waiting for him at the door, absentmindedly twisting her curls through her fingers with one hand and holding the baby monitor tightly with the other. _

_"If you hold that thing any tighter you're going to break it."_

_She shakes her head at him, jumping a bit at his unexpected appearance. _

_"Lola should be waking up soon and I want to hear her call for me."_

_"You mean cry."_

_Olivia throws him a pointed look, irritated at the fact that he hadn't bought into her premonition but before she can say anything, small whimpers make their way through the receiver before growing into a full outcry._

_"I pumped after I put her down, can you get her a bottle from the fridge." _

_And then she turns, making her way up the stairs to attend to the baby leaving him with the receiver. Fitz makes his way to the kitchen, transferring the milk from the small containers that she stored them in and into a bottle before heating it up. He laughs and shakes his head at her voice coming through the speaker, softly encouraging their daughter to speak. 'Say 'Momma'. He hears her say repeatedly, slowing down so that Lola can pick up the syllables coming from her mouth. At this point it was no use trying to convince Olivia that she just wasn't ready to speak so he keeps quiet, picks up the bottle and grabs a burping cloth from the laundry room before making his way to the nursery._

_"Here you go, Sweet Girl. I brought food for you." Fitz coos, trying to peek around Olivia as he enters the room._

_And then it happened. She said her first word and it definitely wasn't 'Momma'._

Lola's giggling brings him out of his story telling reverie.

"I said 'Daddy', first?" Lola laughs, throwing her head back against Olivia's shoulder. "Poor, Momma."

"Yeah. She was a little upset but you said 'Momma' a week later at a huge party that we took you to so she felt like you were saving the best for last."

Lola shakes her head, her curls bouncing in the process, and lays her head back on Olivia's chest in its previous spot.

"Momma's silly." She sighs, closing her eyes to listen.

And it hits him again, that this is all that they'll ever have. Moments in a hospital room where her mother would never properly hold her or tell her stories or make her laugh.

_"Mr. President, a medically induced coma will help her heal properly. Her body and her mind just need a little time to catch up to the trauma and after we stop the medicine, she should be just fine. Don't worry."_

Don't worry.

_"We'll find whoever did this. They're not going to get away with trying to hurt Washington D.C.'s greatest asset. We're doing everything we possibly can, Mr. President. I promise. Don't worry." _

Don't worry.

Those two words always stuck with him. How ironic they were.

Sometimes he wanted to find the nurse and police officer that told him that and yell, scream, do anything that would help him grieve because he didn't worry, just like they told him to and two years later his wife still wasn't with him and her perpetrator still hadn't been found. He had stopped praying about it a long time ago. He would never understand why God would allow him to experience Heaven on Earth before sending him straight to Hell.

Lola's even breathing captures his attention and he longingly smiles at the pair. It's easy when they're both sleeping to imagine that Olivia would wake up and run her hands through Lola's messy thick curls, causing the two of them to joke about the fact that she was nearly bald until she was two. To imagine that eventually she would leave and they would go home where she would make Lola's lunches and tell her silly stories from when she was a baby. When they were sleeping he could imagine anything he wanted to. He could imagine that he was happy. He could imagine their future. What he couldn't imagine was that his future would lay unresponsive in this cold room forever.

Fitz sits back in the chair, letting tears fill his eyes and roll down his face undisturbed. He rarely brought Lola here because it was hard to watch her get older as Olivia stayed the same.

It felt like everyone was moving, changing around him but for the rest of his life he would be stuck in this room with the love of his life.


	2. Chapter 2

It took longer than Fitz thought it would to get himself moving. To simply put on some shoes and throw on a jacket. In the beginning he was always ready. He knew how long it would take him to get from wherever he was to the hospital at any given time. He memorized traffic patterns, back roads, roads that he was less likely to get a ticket for speeding on. You name it.

Two years later it was like he had never even heard of such things. His phone went to voicemail twice before he picked up, not sensing the urgency of the situation. There was a time when he nearly had panic attacks if he had accidentally left his phone in the other room and now he was barely interested in answering it at all.

"You can go in, President Grant."

The nurse reminded him. She seemed impatient almost, as if he was supposed to slam the door open and run into the room as if nothing had changed. Two years ago he might have. Not today. Not after all of the warnings that he had just received. Not after the deluge of thoughts plaguing his mind about her memory and her strength and her personality. He didn't think he could handle opening the door to find a woman that wasn't his wife.

Fitz nods at the woman anyway and goes over his mental pep talk once more before turning the handle and entering the room. He keeps his eyes glued to the floor and his back practically plastered to the, now closed, door while his head hangs between his shoulders, afraid of what he would find if he looked up.

"Hi." Olivia says softly, her voice raspy and low.

It reminds Fitz of the way that she sounded when he would wake her for work in the mornings and it was enough to open the floodgate of tears and send them streaming down his face rapidly. It seemed like a different time when they shared a bed and a room and a living space. A time where he knew exactly what she sounded like when she woke up. He felt like he didn't know this Olivia. Not that she had done anything in two years that he didn't know about but still, things were different.

For a second he is ashamed at his display of emotions and thoughts so he keeps his head down but for the first time in two years he was hearing her voice from something that wasn't a recording or a machine. She was speaking to him. She was awake. It was more overwhelming than he could have ever imagined.

She was still as thin as she was a few days ago when he'd come with Lola but now her hair fell down around her shoulders, longer than he'd ever seen it, instead of being pulled back into a braid. The biggest difference was that her eyes were open. He couldn't fathom the fact that as he looked at her, she could see him.

"Hi." Fitz chokes out, his voice wavering under the onslaught of emotions.

Olivia holds out her hand, her arm outstretched to urge him to come closer. He looked like the same man. His hair was still curly and styled in a way that made her eyes droop in lust. He still preferred to wear a simple sweater during his down time. His eyebrows were still so light that the only people that knew they existed were people that cared to look closely or, in her case, spend as much time as possible becoming familiar with every centimeter of his face. He was still quintessentially Fitz. There were smaller things that bothered her about him, that she would have to familiarize herself with. As he moved to sit at her side on the hospital bed, Olivia began inspecting every new line that etched its way onto his face, tracing her fingers along every single one. He had more gray hair than he'd had the last time she had seen him and although she tried to fight it, she could feel a wave of sadness wash over her.

A man that she once knew in and out had lived a lifetime in her absence. Every difference that she could find on his face was a story that she had not been around to experience. She begins to rub the new scar near his hairline; she'd saved it for last. Scars were permanent stories and lessons. Scars shape a person. It was something so simple but it just reminded her of the daughter that she'd left as a toddler and would meet again as a child. How many scars did she have? How many lessons had she learned from someone that was filling in her mother's place?

Fitz laughs, catching her off guard. One moment he was in tears and the next he was chuckling at an untold joke. Where at one point she was confident that she knew every thought that passed through his mind, she was now stuck in an unfamiliar place that was bolstering with uncertainty. He quells her active mind by bringing his hand up to meet hers, rubbing the scar along with her before bringing their hands to his lap.

"That's thanks to Lola." Fitz answers the unspoken question. "Last summer, I had just transitioned her into a booster seat and there was this record breaking heat wave. The seat was still new and she was still excited about it so she jumps into the back of the car, waits for me to get in the back with her to make sure that her seatbelt is on right and when she touched it, it was too hot. But of course, she's your daughter and has flair for dramatics so instead of just dropping it, she throws it over her shoulder and it hit dear old dad right in the face."

"The metal part?"

"The metal part." Fitz laughs, shaking his head wistfully. "Lola heard Daddy say some very not nice words that day."

Olivia chuckles along with him, trying to imagine their little girl. What would she have been wearing? How did her voice sound when she was excited about something? Did Fitz do her hair or did he have someone to do that for him? There were so many things that she didn't know. It frustrated her and created a painful aching in her chest.

"Can I see her?" Her voice comes out in a whisper, willing herself not to cry. "Can I see Lola?"

All that the nurses were allowed to tell her was what the date was along with a few current events but a nurse did let it slip that while Fitz came to see her almost twice a week that Lola was rarely ever in accompaniment. There had to be a reason and she was worried that he would say no. She wouldn't blame him if he had decided that her inactive presence might have been too confusing for their little girl but she couldn't help but hope that the opposite was true.

He gave her a sad sort of smile so she immediately steeled herself to his negative answer and closed her eyes, hoping to pacify her burning disappointment.

"Here." He said, bumping her hand with his phone.

She opened her eyes unprepared for the picture open on it but her eyes filled with tears anyway. The baby girl that she had left had indeed turned into a beautiful little girl and she had missed all of it.

"That was yesterday morning, getting ready for school. She calls that her 'Mommy look'."

Olivia couldn't help but chuckle looking at her daughter in a knee length trench coat and boots. Still, it was Lola's face that had most of her attention. When she was a baby Olivia had spent hours staring at her, finally understanding what people meant when they said that they could watch someone sleep forever. That was when her face changed every day and Olivia didn't ever want to miss a new freckle or the darkening of her skin or the changing color of her eyes. She wouldn't miss a thing if she never stopped looking but now it was like she had missed her entire life. She zoomed in on the picture and unknowingly traced the contours of her daughter's face the exact same way that her daughter did hers in every new picture that she discovered of her mother.

"She looks like you." Olivia observes aloud causing Fitz to snort in disagreement.

"No, she looks like you." He argues playfully.

Olivia shakes her head, her eyes still glued to the picture.

"The majority of her, yes but the smaller things are all you. The curve of her chin, the sparkle in her eyes…her eyebrows." She finishes with a smirk

He ignores her jab with a roll of his eyes, moving his hand up to caress her wrist. He had noticed those things about her a time or two as well but…

"All I see when I look at her is you."

And for the first time since he's handed her his phone, Olivia looks up at Fitz, her eyes filled with sympathy.

"That must be hard for you with me…" She lets the sentence hang in the open air.

There was no need to finish. They both knew what she was referring to. Their location wouldn't let them forget and drift off into a world where they were by themselves and nothing was unusual.

"In the beginning it was but now…now it's the greatest blessing being able to see you through her." Fitz shakes his head thoughtfully as he speaks. "Plus, she thinks that in a past life you must have been a queen somewhere. She says that you're too beautiful to be anything else. If she looks like you then that must mean that she's beautiful too."

Olivia smiles at that, taking one last look at the phone before handing it back to him.

"The doctor ran a few tests before you got here, you know, trying to assess the functionality of my brain and my body and my memory. Anyway, he said that I'll have to walk with assistance for a while and that I'll have to follow a strict diet as well but that I should be able to go ho-" Olivia stops her rambling at once too afraid to say the word home only to be told that she no longer had one with him. "He said that I should be able to _leave_ by the end of the week and so I was wondering since that's a few days from now if maybe you could bring Lola here. If I could see her _before_ I leave the hospital. If you don't mind."

She could see the confusion written on his face and couldn't place it. It was just another reminder that they'd become strangers in a sense.

"It's just that one of the nurses said that you don't usually bring Lola with you when you come and so I didn't know what you told her. I completely understand if you decided that this was too much or too confusing or whatever. I just…I-I wanted to see her." She continued on trying to clarify for him but she could see the worry in his eyes and it disheartened her.

It wasn't that Fitz didn't want Lola to see her mother awake. It was what he dreamt of every night but that was part of the problem. What if he left her side to get Lola and came back to find that he had imagined it all. His heart couldn't take seeing her again to find that this was all a part of his vivid imagination. The warmth of her skin, the tenor of her voice, the gentleness of her hands were things that his brain had tried to recreate so many times in her absence so he knew that it was real. However, lately life had not been kind to him and it would be his luck that it was, in fact, just a dream. So he shakes his head slowly and tilts her face so that he could look directly into her eyes, not wanting any part of what he was about to say get lost in translation.

"I want you to see your daughter every single day for the rest of your life. Okay?" He waits for her nod before continuing. "I am just _so_ afraid of leaving you here because I don't know what I'll come back to."

"So you didn't leave her at home so that she wouldn't see me?" Her voice is filled with tears and her eyes with doubt.

"She's actually in a kindergarten class at that huge school that you stalked before she was even born." Fitz brags to see her eyes light up at the mention of the ridiculously priced school.

"She got in?" Olivia practically shouts, referring to the rigorous process that was in place.

"Of course she did. You're her mother. She's as brilliant as you are."

And for a moment they're both silent, taking each other in once more. The room felt lighter in a way. Comfortable.

"I can have the agents bring her as soon as school is over. How about in the meantime I catch you up on the last two years?"

"Can I ask questions?"

"As many as you want." Fitz assures, situating himself in the bed so that they could lay side by side, although Olivia ended up sitting half way in his lap.

"I just want to know who does her hair because…well, she's black, Fitz."

The question causes him to throw his head back in laughter and pull her closer into his side as he chuckles his through the answer. It was comforting for the two of them to be able to sit and laugh together. It reminded Olivia of the lazy Sunday mornings that they spent in bed laughing and joking and making love to each other. She felt safe and whole in Fitz' arms. So they sat that way for a good two and a half hours before Lola began making her way to the hospital. Fitz couldn't help but almost bubble over in excitement at the notion of seeing them together again, of seeing them interact.

Fitz suddenly grips Olivia's face with both of his hands, startling her a bit before caressing the tops of her cheeks with his thumbs and then leaning in to kiss her. She expected short and brief but with the way that his tongue caressed hers she could feel every emotion coursing through his body. He couldn't help but want to kiss her until he could no longer breathe but she broke away from him before he could, looking up at him with a smile on her face.

"I love you." Fitz states as if there wasn't a more factual statement on the planet. "I have loved you every single moment since I laid eyes on you and I will love you every single moment until I die."

At the absolute contentment on her face, Fitz could almost physically feel the metaphorical clouds that were constant above him, part. He was holding his future in his hands and it donned on him that he could actually look forward to tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and it was all just because she was with him.

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Reviews are appreciated :-)


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